Echothymia: environmental dependency in the affective domain.

Echothymia is stimulus-bound affective behavior, an echophenomenon in the domain of affect. Like echolalia and echopraxia, it is a concomitant of the environmental dependency associated with dysfunction of the frontal-striatal systems that mediate so-called frontal lobe functions. The authors introduce the definition and phenomenology of echothymia, overview its differential diagnosis and clinical significance, and suggest ways in which understanding echothymia may contribute to clinical management.

The three-dimensional approach to neuropsychiatric assessment.

Brain-behavior relationships form the foundation for clinical assessment in neuropsychiatry and behavioral neurology. The complexity of the brain and its clinical disorders makes it important to have a systematic and useful way to apply them. This article introduces the three-dimensional approach to neuropsychiatric assessment (3DA), a process-based approach to integrating brain-behavior relationships into clinical activity.

Are the available apathy measures reliable and valid? A review of the psychometric evidence.

Objective: Apathy is highly prevalent among neuropsychiatric populations and is associated with greater morbidity and worse functional outcomes. Despite this, it remains understudied and poorly understood, primarily due to lack of consensus definition and clear diagnostic criteria for apathy. Without a gold standard for defining and measuring apathy, the availability of empirically sound measures is imperative.

Apathy after hip fracture: a potential target for intervention to improve functional outcomes.

The authors examined apathy symptoms, their improvement, and their association with functional recovery after a hip fracture. Of 126 participants, 37% had clinically significant apathy symptoms, which predicted functional outcome (i.e.

Disorders of diminished motivation.

Disorders of diminished motivation occur frequently in individuals with traumatic brain injury. Motivation is an ever-present, essential determinant of behavior and adaptation. The major syndromes of diminished motivation are apathy, abulia, and akinetic mutism.

Apathy and executive function in depressed elderly.

Apathy and executive cognitive dysfunction (ECD) are important though conceptually different aspects of late-life depression. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the relationship of apathy to ECD. The authors also evaluated the relationship of apathy and ECD to global cognitive impairment and word generation.